Coding in Circles

Before I head into this weeks rant, I wanted to write a quick aside about my previous post: Frozen Heads and the Naked Man. I’ve been thinking a lot more about it, and I realised that it’s not about the Naked Man at all – it’s about being a man and having the courage to ask for what I want. And while I still kinda want to know if the Naked Man works, it’s much less intimidating if the girl knows that the option for her to say no is out there and acceptable. So instead of “Do you want to come back to my place?”, try “Here’s what I want: I want to take you back to my place and make out and maybe do more. What do you think about that?”. It takes a lot more courage to be able to own it all when I want to escalate, and let her own her own opinion on it. And that’s all I’ve have to say about that for a while I think.

So, on to the topic at hand: money matters. How is it that people less successful than me, with smaller pay checks, still have nicer apartments, more furnishings, better TV’s and can also afford to go out Friday and Saturday nights??!?! This really has me stumped, you guys. I always thought the best way to fix money issues (assuming I’m budgeting properly) was to make more money! Now it seems like I actually need to be female! Somehow the combination of what I would consider ‘normal’ financial pressures, plus the need to buy a new pair of shoes every fortnight has made the fairer sex much more penny-wise. Although that said, they’re also willing to pay $400 for a cardigan.

Aaaanyway, while I’m bitching, why the hell are we as a culture so hell-bent on being deaf in 20 years? Last Friday I was in a bar. Now I don’t want to get into trouble for defaming an establishment, so let’s just pretend it’s called ‘The Agincourt’. The music was so loud that *I* couldn’t hear what I was yelling at people. Now I know that bars have found that when they play their music a little louder, they sell more drinks that night. The reason for this is that when I can’t hear what anyone is saying, I (and I expect a lot of other people) tend to stop talking, not my head blankly, and drink. Quickly. Mainly, this is because I want to get this drink over with and go to a nice quiet cafe instead (yeah, I’m that guy). But if that’s the way most of your clientele are feeling while they’re in your pub, you’re doing it wrong!!

And finally, people with iPods. I’d say don’t get me started, but I’m already out the gate. I don’t need to hear your music up the other end of the bus. You don’t need the music to be that loud to hear it. I tried it once. It hurt. The beautiful thing about portable music players is that they let me bring music into so much more of my life. It’s sort of like having my own soundtrack :). But that’s just what it is to me, a soundtrack. Background music as my feet crunch down the footpath, or as I pant around the jogging track, or as the train lumbers into the station. I simply can’t understand people who want their soundtrack to be so loud they can’t hear their life happening around them. They’re overpowering their best moments, and they’ll never know it. And in 20 years they’ll all be fucking deaf.